Hmm, there seems to be a fair amount of tension between your various statements. Mainly, in the first paragraph that racism helped Obama (and i suspect you don't mean that black voting for black is racist, just race conscious, or even, you seem to imply, merely a matter of reflectivity) but in the second paragraph you claim that Obama didn't use racial politics, the Clintons did. This could be a matter of the lack of need for the Obama camp to invoke race, thus his campaign did not "use race", and I get that. Next, your noting the "looks like me" approach to voting against the power of "social movements", I'm not sure how to sort out that discrepancy. I think it was around the NH primary, where Clinton did much better than polling suggested she would, that the hypothesis came out that folks would admit to pollers they had no problem voting for a black candidate, but when it came to being alone in the booth, they voted their race-informed ways.
I'm also not sure what to make of Obama and Clinton as being virtually identical in terms of political outlook. "Political outlook" taken broadly, it seems to me Obama was much more positive and putting on appearances of the experienced outsider. I don't think the same could be said of the way Clinton came off. Regarding their policy positions, I don't think I paid enough attention to pick up any differences, but my impression was they didn't address policy specifics much at all, so there is some identicalism there.
And I unfortunately don't have the same sense of either the wind blowing in favor of democrats or of Obama's non-whiteness as a non-issue. Here was a nice catch of things to come that appeared on the
Feministe blog, a quote from Chris Matthews:
OK. Let me ask you about how he — how’s he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community and from the people who have college or advanced degrees?
Granted, this is the idiot Matthews (mainly reflected here in contrasting "regular people" to "the African-American community", also the implication that AA people don't have college or advanced degrees), but this is a vibe that is going around already, that African Americans are unintelligent/uneducated (very different things, but currently (and usually) conflated) and will thus follow reflexively. Second, that Obama's other base of support is the liberal academy whose members are so disconnected from reality and brainwashed by a culture of political correctness that to measure meaningful support from
them - those elitists - is out of touch (see also the recent
Weekly Standard piece on this argument for a disconnection of place pinned to Obama). That is one of the arguments circulating and I fear this kind of rhetoric will pick up traction. Add to that, the ridiculous tactic of McCain's campaign that he is actually a maverick - please, stop calling this dud a maverick! I was listening to All Things Considered the other day and host-dude mentions "the maverick Senator McCain" - are you flipping serious?!! Would they ever introduce him as "the elderly Senator McCain"? Of course not (unless it polled well) - how the hell has this picked up traction to the point that the "liberal" NPR regurgitates this nonsense? I have a serious fear that we who hope for Obama over McCain are up to having our spirits dashed (not to mention the ignored, unresolved, and expanded issue of electronic voting, which was controlled and pushed (and is owned) by conservative interests).
I'd be happy to get a boost of hopefulness, so let me in on some of what you are thinking